My Reality (5 page)

And then began, what is still to this day, one of the lowest times of my life. I remember having this feeling that I had lost absolutely everything that was important to me. I had just lost the guy who I loved. I had just lost the Cowboys, which was an organization that had basically kept me sane and had been such a positive outlet for me for the past two years. And all that I had left was a job that didn’t fulfill me.

Soon, I would be twenty-five. And I had nothing checked off my list; the “List” that every girl makes when she’s about thirteen years old; the list that should, theoretically, be checked off by the deadline
you assume. (Note to readers: I found out that twenty-five is wayyyy too young to cap off the list!) Here was mine at the time:

Great Job: No.

Great Guy: No.

Great House: Nope.

Anything fun to look forward to: Absolutely not.

Pity party for one: Yes, please.

What I wanted more than anything for my birthday was just to hear from Tye. Even just a one-word text would be a sign that he was thinking of me. I hadn’t heard a peep from him since our big fight, which was agonizing. As two weeks of radio silence passed, I knew with even greater certainty that things were not looking good for us to get back together.

But I still couldn’t let go. I felt like I was in limbo. And I couldn’t stop reaching out to him. I would find myself at work, watching the seconds drag by, and before I could stop myself, I’d have my phone in my hand. I’d try to control myself, but I never could. The next thing I knew, I’d find myself texting him:

“Hi. Miss you.”

“Hey. Can you call me?”

And this wasn’t just every once in a while, either. Every day I would text him any little thing I could think of, just hoping to get an answer. Boy, I really should have read a book on what
not
to do when going through a breakup. But no matter how many texts I sent, I still got no response.

I couldn’t give up. I had this idea in my mind that Tye was just as miserable as I was, but that he was just being stubborn. He didn’t want to be the one to call me because it would make him seem weak.
And so I felt like I had to call him—not just for me but for both of us. When I did call, it always went straight to voicemail. Even with the many times I called and texted him in those weeks, I never heard anything back from him.

I had found out that the day after we’d broken up, which was a Saturday, he’d gone to Southlake. This is his hometown, and his parents and brother still live there. So, of course, being Queen of Denial, I reasoned that he went home because the only people who could make him feel better were members of his family. And he obviously was just as crushed as I was about the breakup.

This was great! This was exactly where I wanted him to be after we broke up: hanging out with his family. Not going out with the guys and meeting girls. And talking to girls. And flirting with girls. But then I learned that he’d gone to Southlake just to attend his nephew’s Little League football game. So much for my theory. Even worse, I soon started hearing from girls in Tye’s circle that he really
was
going out and meeting girls, and talking to girls, and flirting with girls. In other words, he was fine. I never asked for these status updates, mind you, and I don’t know why the girls gave them to me. (Maybe just a case of girls being girls?) If they could have felt how big the knife was that went into my chest when I heard about Tye with another girl, they might have thought better of it.

Finally, it was the day I had dreaded: March 11, my twenty-fifth birthday. First thing when I woke up, I checked my phone, hoping for some word from Tye. Nothing.

I went to work. Checked my phone. Nothing.

All of my colleagues took me out to lunch to help try to cheer me up.

I checked my phone. Still. Nothing.

That night, five of my closest friends, including Reagan and Stefani, took me out for a birthday celebration at a themed restaurant called Medieval Times. For those of you who are not lucky enough to have a Medieval Times in your neighborhood, it is literally dinner in a tournament setting. You eat with your hands . . . You drink out of a jar . . . You watch knights battle in the arena . . . And—oh yes—there’s actual jousting, folks. My friends knew it was corny, but that was supposed to be part of the fun. They were hoping that if they went completely silly and over-the-top, I’d forget my heartbreak. They had planned in advance to have the knights give me all of the attention, so the knights presented me with roses, and they crowned me the “goddess of love and beauty.” It was all very sweet, but the whole thing made me feel even more pathetic—especially because there were only about ten other people in the whole place, and so the mood of the entire evening was kind of sad, and lame, and low energy. I found myself just sitting there, despondently staring off into space.

This is what’s happened to my life? Seriously? This is my twenty-fifth birthday, and I’m sitting at Medieval Times with five people, and the knights are giving me a sash? This cannot be real.

But it was. Painfully real.

I commend my friends for trying, even in the midst of my misery. I’m sure I wasn’t exactly good company, and I certainly couldn’t have sat home alone, especially as the night wore on with no word from Tye. I was distraught. And I’m sure I didn’t do much of a job of hiding it from them.

That birthday is kind of what triggered everything that happened afterward, including
The Bachelor.
I took stock of my life that night. I was now twenty-five. I had a job that I didn’t really care for. I was not even close to dating somebody who I’d be with for the rest of
my life. I didn’t have anything in my life that was just for me that I loved. Out of everything on my personal checklist, I had nothing. I felt empty and lonely.

This reality was very hard for me to face. I was coming out of a time in my early twenties when I had had a lot of momentum, and I had thought things would continue to go like that, or get even better, as I got older. I never expected anything like this. At the ripe old age of twenty-five, everything was falling apart.

Before Tye, I had been in a seven-year relationship with my high school sweetheart, Josh. It ended with me getting—you guessed it—dumped, and, even worse, he had cheated on me. But the fact that we had been together that long had made me feel, for a time, like marriage was just an easy step away for me. We broke up just two weeks before our college graduation. And! Here’s the kicker: He was engaged by the time graduation came around (yes . . . in a whopping two weeks). Talk about being devastated. I felt taken advantage of and betrayed. For the seven years before our breakup, I’d had my life planned out, with the person I’d thought I was going to be with . . . and then, it was all pulled out from under me.

After being in a relationship from the age of fifteen, I was totally unaware of how to be an “I.” I had been a “we” for as long as I could remember. But at that point, something inside of me just took over, and I went on autopilot. I graduated college. I moved forty-five minutes away to Dallas, got my own apartment, and found a job. I even saved up enough money to buy my own car. And I did it all by myself. Looking back, I realize that I was being pretty darn independent for a twenty-two-year-old!

When I couldn’t quite shake the low self-esteem I felt in the wake of my breakup from Josh, I had sought out something bigger than me, an adventure, to take my mind off the past and push me
into an even better future. That’s when I became a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader. Because this was something that was a challenge for me, it made me feel as though I had the power to accomplish things and improve my situation in life. I had assumed this would be true forever.

And so, when I was younger, I had gone ahead and mapped it all out. By the time I was twenty-five, I was going to have a six-figure job. I was going to own my own house. I was going to be married and working on having kids. I was going to be so happy.

Instead I was sitting in Medieval Times wearing a cardboard crown and a fake satin sash, holding my wilting roses. Not quite the American Dream that I had imagined for myself.

Tye remained MIA on my birthday. Clearly, he didn’t want to have anything to do with me, and as long as that was the case, I was determined not to see him and let him know how hurt I was by his absence. As much as a part of me really wanted to see him, I continued making sure to stay away from the places where I might run into him. But, it was impossible for me to cut him out of my life completely, as I had done when Josh broke my heart at the end of college, and I left him, my old friends, and the entire city of Denton, Texas, behind. It wasn’t as easy with Tye. We lived five minutes apart, and Dallas was my home now. Our lives were so intertwined; it was hard to avoid him or his friends.

I had managed to avoid seeing Tye for almost a month after we broke up. And then, St. Patty’s Day rolled around. Even though I knew he’d be out on the town with his friends, I figured there would be a million people out in the city that night, and there was no way I’d run into him. As usual, Dallas had closed its downtown streets for its annual parade, which I had gone to with a couple of my girlfriends.

My roommate, Leah, and I had cut the sleeves and midriffs off of our T-shirts, and made them into these little halter tops, which we tied in the back and wore with jeans. When I looked in the mirror before I went out that night, I was feeling pretty cute for the first time in ages, which made me feel better about the possibility of running into Tye. Seeing him was always in the forefront of my mind, when I knew there was a chance (even a slim one!) that we’d cross paths. And then, my mind games would run wild:
It’s probably real easy for him, if he doesn’t see me. I mean, he is a very “out of sight, out of mind” kind of guy. But if he runs into me, it will probably stir up all of those intense feelings he had for me and maybe even make him want me again.

And that, of course, was still my secret hope.

After the parade was over, a bunch of us girls went to Primo’s Bar & Grille to grab some food. Ironically, it was where Tye and I had originally met, a year and a half earlier. But, despite my secret desire to see him, I truly felt that there was no way he’d be there that night, given all of the bars in the city, and so I wasn’t expecting a run-in.

Of course, as soon as my girlfriends and I arrived, I looked up, and there he was, standing at the bar, looking cute in his light green T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots (yes, I still remember exactly what he was wearing). I felt like someone had just sucker-punched me in the gut when I saw him. It was that feeling you get when your heart literally drops into your stomach. The usual inner debate started in my head: Do I go say hi to him? Do I not say hi to him? Do I pretend I didn’t see him and wait for him to say hi to me?

And then, we had that moment of completely awkward eye contact from across the room. And, to make things even harder, he was talking to a girl: some cute little blonde. Okay, okay . . . she could
have very well been an eighty-year-old granny with a hunchback, but I saw a
Playboy
model. What stupid mind games we all play! I sat there, frozen, wondering what I should do. I didn’t want to look, but I couldn’t help myself.

I felt like I had to do something, since I hadn’t seen or heard from him in a month, and I was desperate to know how he was, and how he’d been feeling. I knew this was my one chance to talk to him. So, finally, I walked up to him. As I did, I could feel these big crocodile tears forming in my eyes. I fought them back, thinking,
Don’t cry. Don’t cry.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I asked.

But it felt awkward. The tears were so close to the surface, and I was trying so hard to keep them in.

“Hey, how’ve you been?” he asked, nonchalantly, as if I was his buddy. “You doing okay?”

I paused for a second before I answered, and a huge tear ran down my cheek. “No, I’m not okay,” I said.

He reached out with both of his hands and stroked my arms, just trying to calm me down. Looked me right in the eyes and smiled at me.

“It’s going to be okay,” he said.

All of a sudden, I was comforted.

Oh my gosh, so he DOES miss me. And he’s going to call me after tonight. And the relationship is going to work out after all. He clearly wouldn’t tell me it would be okay, if it wouldn’t be, right? He definitely wants us to get back together!

Oh, Melissa.

Now, when I look back, I realize that that wasn’t what he was trying to get across at all. What he meant was: You’ll be okay on your
own
.

I think he just didn’t know what to say, and his way of dealing
with the emotional hot mess in front of him was to say that it was going to be okay.

I attempted to smile back at him. We said an awkward goodbye. I walked away and sat down with my friends again, but I kept looking back at him. I couldn’t help it. He went back to talking to the little blonde girl who had been standing next to him the whole time. Their conversation didn’t look particularly romantic, but it still hurt to watch. I kept thinking:
I was just up there. I just talked to him, and now he’s talking to HER.

I have no idea who she was—she very well could have been his cousin, but just the SIGHT of him interacting with a female tore me up inside.

My friends and I ended up leaving Primo’s before our food order arrived. I’d thought that I would be okay if I saw Tye and that I’d be able to hide my sadness. But I failed miserably on both counts. And I could no longer deny that Tye was handling the breakup just fine. All of the pain and doubt that I had believed he was feeling existed only in my mind.

Tye was out and about. He was talking to his friends. He was chatting up girls. Meanwhile, I was still totally miserable. And my heartbreak got worse when I had to admit that the reason that Tye hadn’t been in touch was because he didn’t miss me, and NOT because he just didn’t know what to say. And then, I started analyzing everything all over again and feeling like maybe he had wanted to break up with me all along. And I had finally given him an out that night when I exploded on him. I had probably made it very easy for him to move on without even realizing it.